rom the beginning we find that offences
against the common good are punished, not simply as such, but as
misconduct bringing on the community, and not merely on the offender,
the wrath of gods or spirits. In other words--Mr. Hobhouse's words, p.
119--"in the evolution of public justice, we find that at the outset
the community interferes mainly on what we may call supernatural
grounds only with actions which are regarded as endangering its own
existence." We may then fairly say that if the community inflicts
punishments mainly on supernatural grounds from the time when the
evolution of public justice first begins, then morality from its very
beginning was reenforced--indeed prompted--by religion. The morality
was indeed only the custom of the community; but violation of the
custom was from the beginning regarded as a religious offence and was
punished on supernatural grounds.

The view that morality and religion are essentially distinct, that
morality not only can stand alone, without support from religion, but
has in reality always stood without such support--however much {224}
the fact has been obscured by religious prepossessions--this view
receives striking confirmation from the current and generally accepted
theory of the origin and nature of justice. That theory traces the
origin of justice back to the feeling of resentment experienced by the
individual against the particular cause of his pain (Westermarck,
_Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas_, I, 22). Resentment leads
to retaliation and takes the form of revenge. Vengeance, at first
executed by the person injured (or by his kin, if he be killed), comes
eventually, if slowly, to be taken out of the hands of the person
injured or his avengers, and to be exercised by the State in the
interests of the community and in furtherance, not of revenge, but of
justice and the good of society. Thus not only the origin of justice,
but the whole course of its growth and development, is entirely
independent of religion and religious considerations. Throughout, the
individual and society are the only parties involved; the gods do not
appear--or, if they do appear, they are intrusive and superfluous. If
this be the true view of the history and nature of justice, it may--and
probably must--be the truth about the whole of morality and not only
about justice. We have but {225} to follow Dr. Westermarck (_ib._, p.
21) in grouping the moral emotions under the two head